Susan carefully designed the session with Molly so that students in small groups prepared questions based on four themes: the book, mothering, blogging, and Molly's Marshall experience. Four to five students at a time sat in front of the camera and directly conversed with Molly while the rest of the class listened and reviewed their potential questions for her, simultaneously editing on their doc to avoid repeat conversation. The other students not directly in the conversation also took notes for a future blog post that they would be writing regarding their conversation. Click here to link to the senior class's student blogs.
A lot of the success of this activity has to do with the preparation discussion work Susan has done with the class. This year two "captain" students drafted their respective discussion teams. Class discussions work similar to a fish bowl activity, where one group on the inside holds a discussion while the group on the outside takes notes and prepares for their time in the center. Groups each receive a group grade based on the quality and distribution of conversation points among the group. For the Skype session, Susan divided the two main groups into four sub-groups. As groups joined in conversation with Molly it was apparent that certainly the premise of the group conversation grade still motivated most students to buy into the conversation, but more so, students wanted to have a great conversation for the sake of the conversation. In fact, to help navigate the conversation among the four in the "hot seats," I noticed that students were using the chat function on the Google doc to let each other know if they needed to make adjustments in their conversation and question plan they had previously created. (This is probably the best use of the chat feature I have seen in the last three years.)
Finally, after Molly needed to leave the conversation, Susan spent time reflecting with the class on how the discussion went. While watching this activity, it was easy to see how much interest the students took in Molly's perspective as a mother and as a Marshall grad. Some groups focused more heavily on her experiences after leaving Marshall and going to college, while another focused more heavily on how her lens as a newer mother colored her perception of the text. Overall, Molly and Susan's classes nurtured a natural, informative, and fun conversation that really allowed for the soon-to-be Marshall graduates an opportunity to ask an alum a lot of questions regarding, essentially, parallel Marshall experiences and experiences that await these seniors once they leave Marshall.
To get a feel for the conversation, check out the following video:
2. Dave Risdon incorporated video to push students to work on their own improvisations on a piece of student-chosen music.
Dave talked about how much of high school Strings has to do with students learning director-chosen pieces, whether for concerts, small-group ensembles, or solos. On the other hand, he also places value on the skills and enjoyment students gain through improvisation and through student-choice in playing music to which they may regularly listen. Particularly, with improvisation students must be aware of the scale their chosen piece is set to so that the notes they add as harmony are in the same key and complimentary.
Here is a video of Jon's improv on the bass:
The second thing I like about this project is that it really would not be possible without technology. Sure, students could perform their improvisations outside of class, but realistically, something like this could not be built into the class schedule. Additionally, the use of video recording allows students to get it right, to have multiple chances to come up with improvisations that sound good with the melody. (Granted, this second point requires students to review and analyze what they recorded and then go back and fix it, which not all chose to do.)
Finally, Dave also scaffolded his assignment for his students just as Susan scaffolded her class's conversation. Here is the video Dave created for his students to give them an idea of what he was looking for with the assignment.
(Added note: Dave, this video is unlisted on Youtube so that no one can find it other than those who find it here.)
3. Scott's sixth grade English class created a video book review and audio book summary, which were then linked to classroom books via QR Codes.
During this project, students first learned the basics of video filming, transferring files from iPad to laptop, and finally, manipulating the film in iMovie. As students gained greater confidence with these skills, they honed in on their final product for the book review video. Students shared their completed videos with me; I uploaded them to Youtube to my account as unlisted videos, and then we created a Google Site where the videos could be embedded for easy viewing. In addition to the video component, students recorded themselves reading the summary of their book in Garageband. We then exported the files out of Garageband as mp3s and used an embedded music player on the Google Site to play the mp3 files we had uploaded to the site.
(screenshot of the sixth grade book review website)
The sixth graders did not stop there, however. The beauty of the iPad in part is that it allows for students to have a portable QR Code reader, and to leverage this, we connected all the video and audio with QR Codes, which students then taped to the books in Mr. KJ's class.
Eventually, the goal is to add QR Codes to books in the library to help students get an audio or visual quick representation of what they may want to read for class, outside reading, or on their own.
Here is an example of one of the student book review videos:
